Tuesday, May 29, 2012

This place is crazy.

We are in the homestretch of the end of school. It's hot, children are complacent at best, and we have a crap ton of obligations to scratch off of the ol' to-do list. Forget grades! Let's build something, kids.

The mural is not easy to figure out how to lay out, and granted, I should have had a talk with my dad, or the maintenance guys, or somebody else (anybody else!) who had a brain about these logistics. Perhaps I breathed in too much spray paint. Lordy.

Shim-shimmery.

I didn't have that conversation, though. I laid out the first layer because I was worried about structure, and cemented the suckers up. Halfway through, I realized that was just about the dumbest thing I could have possibly done. This mural needs strategically-placed gaps to accomodate the crazy dimensions of these tiles (particularly in the O section). Kids build with clay, and not everything is precise, let's face it. So, I was left with places where tiles were just not fitting, and luckily, we could pry off the problematic ones and readjust to fit the mural into place. In retrospect, I should have built the mural by placing tiles in vertical groupings, and just line 'em up as they were needed (which we did for the latter portion). I know that the central part of the mural would be way more precise if I had started out this way, but in the spirit of Louise Nevelson, I just have to say that I reacted to what the art was telling me to do, and this is how it turned out. Wanna make something of it? HUH?!?